…I was prodded into having another look on You Tube at some past clips on the great George Best after another pal shared some old black and white film on the man… yeez can click it above and see just what a bluudy genius he was on a football field… yeez can keep yer Messi, yer Ronaldo, yer Maradonna… Georgie Best was better than any of them, and I put him on a par with Pele for sheer footballing skills… some of yeez have seen before an article I did a wee while back on Georgie, and I render no apologies for copying it in here again… LUVVED the man… he was a real footballer… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

A trip down memory lane and a look at one of the greatest footballers of all-time, George Best.

SIMPLY THE BEST

…it’s not just because I’m a Manchester United nut…(I was born six years later in the same street in Govan, Glasgow as Sir Alex Ferguson)…fifty years ago, as lads in the school play-grounds, and on the dirt pitches around Glasgow, we played a different sort of football from the modern stuff currently served up on the television screens every weekend…no fancy coaching…up to twenty-a-side street teams versus neighbouring street teams…a tennis ball or rubber ball no bigger than a cricket ball (whatever that was) served the purpose, until the cheaper Mouldmaster real-football sized versions became accessible…I often wonder if the pedigree athletes swanning around on the deck every TV match I watch are capable of using the ball for more than a one-touch pass…dribbling we called it back then…and tackling wasn’t a dirty word…no less so ‘shoulder-charging’, including the goalies, most of whom, by the way, could look after themselves very well physically, thank you very much…little wonder, when I worked in London (as a Scot, I told them I was there as a missionary) that I look back on the few occasions I had the chance to watch LIVE, the great Georgie Best, and realize just how good the man was…at one match at Crystal Palace (yes, they did populate the top flight at one time…), the pitch was doing a passable imitation of a mud bath obstacle course …remember the balls back then were heavier beasties than the featherweight ping-pong balls they seem to smack 1,000 yards nowadays… it didn’t matter that there were ten other United players on the field that day… George swiveled and turned the whole ninety minutes …the old cliché is that with one body swerve he could send the entire crowd the wrong way… be that as it may, what I saw him do all day that day will live in my mind forever …he may have played in grander matches and scored umpteen goals, captured in reels elsewhere… amid the mud and desperate lunging tackles, he danced away every time, as if the ball was part of his toes… and we, we of a certain age, ballet-danced through the mire with him… back on the play-grounds, scoring through the piled jackets of goal posts in countless open-scrub yards in cities up and down the country… I’m a grown man, supposedly a hard product of the docklands in Govan, but the day Georgie Best died, I sobbed my guts out… the world had lost an icon… one of the finest, if not the finest, exponents of the beautiful game… his back story and struggles are well recorded and I’ll let others dwell on that… but for me, the most magical player I’ve ever seen play live… simply the Best…

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George was a lovely guy, hugely talented and an inspiration to young footballers during my day, especially as kids over a felt cloth Subbuteo table when we all wanted to be George Best . I was fortunate to have met him several times, unfortunately many of those times were in the Red Lion on Jermyn Street… A great loss.